KIM’S CONVENIENCE SETS UP SHOP AT THE SEGAL
The multi-award-nominated CBC sitcom featuring everybody’s favourite Korean family store returns to its theatrical roots.
Kim’s Convenience, the fictional Korean family store situated somewhere in Toronto’s Regent Park, is in big trouble. In Ins Choi’s brisk 90-minute comedydrama, gentrification would seem to promise a boost to custom, except that dreaded behemoth Walmart is about to move into the area and put a chokehold on local retailers.
Kim’s Convenience, the show, by contrast, is unlikely to be putting the shutters up anytime soon. As well as this touring revival of Soulpepper’s phenomenally successful stage production (it was initially picked up from the Toronto Fringe), the CBC television spinoff has been nominated for 11 Canadian Screen Awards and greenlit for a second season.
Weyni Mengesha’s enjoyably unfussy production, which is setting up shop on Segal’s main stage, features the TV version’s two main players, Paul SunHyung Lee and Jean Yoon as Appa (Dad) and Umma (Mom) respectively, both of whom have played Mr. and Mrs. Kim hundreds of times on stage by now. Joining them are Rosie Simon as rebellious daughter Janet, and Richard Lee as wayward prodigal son Jung. Ronnie Rowe Jr. plays various other characters, including one or two irksome customers and an amiable cop who has always had a soft spot for Janet.
Rowe Jr. is black, which fact provides a nudge to Mr. Kim’s politically incorrect, hair-trigger
suspicions. “He’s a steal,” Mr. Kim urgently and outrageously whispers to his daughter as one of the customers played by Rowe Jr. browses the shelves. But Mr. Kim directs most of his animus at the Japanese: He hasn’t forgiven them for their conquest and enslavement of Korea in 1905, and he isn’t about to overlook illegally parked Hondas outside his shop.
These simmering racial tensions are played mostly for laughs and are usually resolved by a spot of physical comedy or by the insistence that we can all get along after all (a cheerful twist to the Rodney King story emphasizes this sentiment).
Even though Choi probably didn’t envisage his play would become a TV phenomenon when he first wrote it, it has the sensibility of a harmless, feel-good sitcom. And when long-simmering family tensions explode into shouty recriminations, it has the sensibility of a soap.
But the one-liners and, especially, Sun-Hyung Lee’s playing of them (he has a natural screen comedian’s way with reaction shots), are very funny, so it feels a lot like a superior sitcom. And the big emotional scenes are genuinely affecting, taking it beyond the realms of soap and into the realms of rich, muscular drama.
It might be argued that many of the laughs initially seem to be coming at the expense of Mr. and Mrs. Kim’s “funny” accents. But by the end of the play, both have emerged as three-dimensional figures with believable, even compelling backstories. Mr. Kim, for instance, turns out to be not “just” a shopkeeper, but like many immigrants to Canada, somebody who has had to forget his more accomplished past. And while Mrs. Kim at first seems a bit of an oddball — mostly silent save for screeching her daughter’s name or weirdly singing hymns around the shop — a very moving scene in which she tries to save her son from despair brings Yoon closer to the more rounded version of her character as seen on TV.
Fans of that show will no doubt get a kick out of seeing its two stars repeating their roles so skilfully in the flesh. Those who haven’t yet tuned in should find enough here to persuade them to go shopping for more, Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on CBC.